Hands Off protests are slated for cities and towns across America on Saturday, including dozens of demonstrations across Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. Here, a protester holds a sign at Montana State University on March 7 during the "Stand Up for Science" rally in Bozeman, one of thousands of events nationwide protesting the Trump administration's sweeping cuts to federal agencies and research funding. Photo by Hazel Kramer
by Robert Chaney
Like a biology project outgrowing its petri dish, public anger over federal cuts has metastasized from science programs in Montana to many other community services.
The “Stand Up For Science” movement representing researchers from public laboratories and college campuses across the country will find itself rallying shoulder-to-shoulder with a national “Hands Off” protest tomorrow. Greater Yellowstone communities planning Hands Off events on April 5 include Bozeman, Livingston, Gardiner, Red Lodge, Columbus,Jackson, Wyoming, and Driggs, Idaho, along with most other major Montana cities such as Missoula, Billings, Helena, Great Falls, Kalispell and Butte. Most events are set for noon Saturday in public places such as county courthouses.
“Now it’s pulling in women’s issues, veterans’ issues, museum issues, everything,” said Kim Hasenkrug, a retired researcher from the National Institutes of Health affiliated Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, where he’s helping organize a Hands Off rally on Saturday. Advocates for Social Security, public lands, Medicaid, free speech and many other causes have pledged to attend.
Since taking office on January 20, President Donald Trump’s restructuring of the U.S. federal workforce has eliminated tens of thousands of public employees and frozen or canceled funding for a wide variety of government services. Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy triggered about 20,000 staff reductions through firings, early retirements and buy-outs, affecting everything from Head Start preschool children’s assistance to Rocky Mountain Labs’ Lyme disease research.
RML lost about 40 workers in the HHS cuts last week. But the impact could be far larger. A 2023 economic analysis found the 400 jobs at the Ravalli County science campus contributed $89.2 million in local after-tax income and supported an additional $231.8 million spread across affiliated Montana businesses and non-business organizations.
“Science has pretty much come to a standstill, even for the people who are still there. It’s a tremendous waste of money.” – Kim Hasenkrug, retired scientist, Rocky Mountain Labs
The National Institutes of Health’s Bethesda headquarters shared reports with Mountain Journal that listed the extent of the RIFs. It included the entire Office of Acquisitions, which handled everything from sticky notes to multimillion-dollar contracts for lab support on a nationwide basis. Lab workers in Montana were able to share supplies across projects for a few days after the office was eliminated on April 2, but several said those stocks have run out.
One project at the Hamilton Rocky Mountain Laboratories, for example, involving human tissue acquired from across the United States requires daily sampling at precise times. Workers on that project said they exhausted their supplies of testing materials on April 4, jeopardizing the integrity of the entire experiment.
“The only way they can get anything is if something is still in a stock room in Bethesda,” Hansenkrug said. “Science has pretty much come to a standstill, even for the people who are still there. It’s a tremendous waste of money.”
A protester in Bozeman on March 7 holds a sign during the Stand Up for Science protest. Hands Off protests are scheduled for Saturday April 5 nationwide. Photo by Hazel Kramer
Both internal and public communications staff were hit particularly hard. That included the people who responded to all congressional inquiries on research activity, as well as handled public outreach, Freedom of Information Act requests, and media questions.
Health and Human Services “is centralizing communications across the department to ensure a more coordinated and effective response to public health challenges, ultimately benefiting the American taxpayer,” an HHS spokesperson told The New York Times on Tuesday.
Other behind-the-scenes cuts hit the NIH property management staff, which handled everything from identity cards to internal mail service and records storage. The Human Capital Branch recruited and funded new staff and partnerships with NIH labs, along with numerous other human-resources duties.
Public libraries across the nation are scrambling to figure out the ramifications of Trump’s closure of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. While Montana’s funding hasn’t been changed yet, many states with Democrat-led governments have had their support frozen or terminated.
“Montana gets $1.4 million in federal funding through IMLS,” according to Janay Johnson of the Bozeman Public Library Friends and Foundation. That money is distributed across the state, but the impacts will be more acutely felt in rural small-town and reservation-based libraries, she said.
For example, part of that money goes to a software subscription shared among 35 libraries to operate their card catalogs and interlibrary loan network. A single state license connects all those individual libraries. If Bozeman or Missoula had to get an individual subscription, it would cost between $100,000 and $200,000.
“The general operating support grant we receive is close to 90 percent of our funding.” – Jill Baker, Executive Director, Humanities Montana
Federal funding freezes hit other parts of Montana. Smoke Elser and Eva-Maria Maggi’s presentations on their new book, Hush of the Land, stalled Thursday when their National Endowment for the Humanities grant was canceled.
“On Wednesday night, I received an email from the acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, terminating our general operating support grant,” said Jill Baker, executive director of Humanities Montana, the private nonprofit organization that oversees more than $900,000 in federal support for cultural programs throughout the state. “The general operating support grant we receive is close to 90 percent of our funding.”
That affects programming in things as big as national speakers lecturing at Bozeman’s Museum of the Rockies to start-up arts programs in Roscoe.
“Congress allocated that funding to us, so we’re looking at all the avenues to try and reverse this decision,” Baker said. “We’ve been in all 56 counties, and most of our funding has been awarded and invested in rural communities. I’m really worried about the gap that’s going to leave for small museums and libraries.”
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About Robert Chaney
Robert Chaney grew up in western Montana and has spent most of his journalism career writing about the Rocky Mountain West, its people, and their environment. His book The Grizzly in the Driveway earned a 2021 Society of Environmental Journalists Rachel Carson Award. In Montana, Chaney has written, photographed, edited and managed for the Hungry Horse News, Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Missoulian and Montana Free Press. He studied political science at Macalester College and has won numerous awards for his writing and photography, including fellowships at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and the National Evolutionary Science Center at Duke University.
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